The Body’s Affection: between emotional attachment and danced movement

Abstract

Affect is experienced by the dancer at a basic energetic level: a need to breathe – breathe in the world through the body and breathe out the body into the world. Through this movement of affect the dancer experiences a bodily transformation process as a vital need. This study confronts the sensory-somatic perception of affect as a force of movement experienced by the practice of dance, with the notion of affection taken as an emotional bond between individuals studied by developmental psychology. By giving voice to dance knowledge and by using the theory of Cognitive Metaphors of Lakoff and Johnson, it seeks to deepen the origin of the sense of affection and to understand how its transference of meaning between the dance and psychology occurs. In both fields, affection reveals itself as a survival force. However, dance perceives affection at a pre-personal level, as a force of the body-world relation, whereas developmental psychology perceives affection at a conscious level, i.e. at the level of a body that has already passed through a process of subjectivation.